Unfortunately, due to its highly volatile and constantly breaking userspace ABI, nouveau remains to be unusable in our environment for quite some time to come, because there is no way to guarantee matching kernel and userspace ABIs (even less so with Debian being in freeze and 4 kernel versions behind). Therefore we have no other choice than to disable the nouveau kernel modules alltogether, as there simply is no compatible userspace available in Debian - and because upgrading- and downgrading kernel versions (XOR userspace) isn't possible at all, everything must remain in lockstep.

While Debian can (and does) provide nouveau for their upcoming stable (squeeze), they can only do so because they'll always stick to their kernel 2.6.32 (with 2.6.33 drm code) and matching userspace throughout the whole lifecycle of squeeze, but given the volatility of nouveau this also means that squeeze users with nvidia graphics hardware won't be able to use other kernels than Debian/ squeeze provided ones. This will break spectacularly once testing goes wheezy and unfreezes, with new kernel/ mesa versions flowing in (and upon partial squeeze --> wheezy upgrades). Combined with the fact that so far nouveau doesn't degrade gracefully with missing (or incompatible) kernel <-> userspace ABIs (inability to decode EDID/ DDC, abysmal performance), it remains to be unsuitable for rolling releases (Fedora tries to counteract this with draconian package dependencies/ conflicts in rawhide, but this would violate Debian policies and is even impossible to implement in Debian).

Unfortunately xorg-server prefers xserver-xorg-video-nouveau over xserver-xorg-video-nv, if it detects nVidia graphics, which means xserver-xorg-video-nouveau needs to be purged (or xorg.conf{,\\d} to forced to nv for usable operations. However disabling KMS or blacklisting of kernel modules is pointless and - due to these things tending to get forgotten, once nouveau goes out of staging and promises a usable/ stable userspace ABI - is even "dangerous".

To put is short, if you have xserver-xorg-video-nouveau installed, purge it - because it simply doesn't work (in a rolling release) yet and actively breaks using nv/vesa/${evil_proprietary_crap}; which is a pity, because technically nouveau would be a decent driver exceeding nv/ vesa by far.

DeepDayze

Post subject:Posted: 07.01.2011, 18:02

Joined: 2010-09-11
Posts: 616
Location: USA
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nouveau is still in active and heavy development though, and once it stabilizes then it should indeed be a decent replacement for the deprecated and unsupported nv driver as it eventually will at least provide basic 3d on a par with the radeon driver which nv currently lacks.

I tested the nouveau driver on my nvidia 7900GS and it works quite well with just 2D support at the moment.

zen

Post subject:Posted: 07.01.2011, 18:58

Joined: 2011-01-07
Posts: 5
Location: Ukraine
Status: Offline

Nouveau basically works fine with my nvidia geforse 9600 GT but 3D in Googleearth is tooooo slow, so i have to remove nouveau, if it will work with simple 3d in future i will use it for sure.

DeepDayze

Post subject:Posted: 07.01.2011, 23:45

Joined: 2010-09-11
Posts: 616
Location: USA
Status: Offline

zen wrote:

Nouveau basically works fine with my nvidia geforse 9600 GT but 3D in Googleearth is tooooo slow, so i have to remove nouveau, if it will work with simple 3d in future i will use it for sure.

Right now 3d is very poor in nouveau so its not a good idea to use it with 3d apps such as GE yet. It is quite usable with 2D stuff though.

slam

Post subject:Posted: 19.02.2011, 15:18

Team Member

Joined: 1970-01-01
Posts: 607
Location: w3
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As most people with Nvidia cards are probably not aware, the new free and open source driver Nouveau is already enabled in Aptosid kernels, and does work well for most cards and use cases. So, it's time to finally get rid of the closed source malware, and potentially problematic 3rd party repositories. Here is how to do that:

In KDE System Settings turn all desktop effects off. Remove all 3rd party repositories from /etc/apt/sources.list.d/. Remove all traces of nvidia in: /etc/default/dmakms, /etc/X11/xorg.conf.d/ and /usr/src/.